Ooh, look at all the pretty moving colors...

[grammargirl]

For the past two months, I've been living without a TV. This wasn't any kind of deliberate, life philosophy type decision; it's just that in my sublet this summer there was a TV but no one wanted to pay for cable, and it's not like I had a lot of vegging time through training anyway, so I didn't even really notice the absence. Mostly if I wanted to turn off my brain for a while I'd watch one of Ted's My So-Called Life DVDs (gotta get my hands on my own set of those) or take a nap or something. mary_wroth and elephantgiraffe don't even own a TV, so when I started spending a lot of time over there it was kind of a cool lesson in how people interact with each other when they don't have the ubiquitous box to stare at. Honestly, it's been nice.

Back in Ann Arbor, my former roommate still has cable, and it was kind of amazing how fast I fell back on that as my default putting-off-stuff-I-should-be-doing activity. Last night Aubs and I got lucky and stumbled onto both Monsters, Inc. and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? before we both got sleepy and crashed, so we spent most of last night alternating between watching those and messing around on her computer, because heaven forbid that after two months of not seeing each other we should actually, like, sit in the same place and talk. It's weird how conditioned we've become to interacting with each other around those distractions. This morning I woke up and, yep, the first thing I did after checking my e-mail was flip on the TV. This time, without the buffer of Friday night movie luck, faced with the utter wasteland that is Saturday morning TV, I came to my senses pretty quickly and gave up.

I don't really know where this is going, except I think I'm not going to be as resistant to the idea of not having cable as Haley expected me to be. If it ends up being like Ann Arbor, where new-user deals actually make it cheaper to have both high-speed internet and cable, well, we'll see. Maybe we'll just end up with DSL. The point is, I think it's about time for me to make the transition from cable to a Netflix subscription.

Comments

[ma-ee-uh.livejournal.com]

Where I live, I have a clear shot of the Empire State Building (where the antennae are) so I don't need cable -- I get 7 channels and decent enough reception. But generally speaking, I only watch one or two shows, and mostly rely on Netflix for my vegging-out needs. I looove Netflix.

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

Netflix is awesome, but you have to plan ahead if you want to watch something specific on a specific night.

[elephantgiraffe.livejournal.com]

Mmm... ubiquitous

[adam-oddfellow.livejournal.com]

Only problem with not having cable is not having The Daily Show. I don't ever watch anything else on TV anyway.